Take your crastination to the pro level with us as we present to you a list of ten famous people and their alma maters! Who knows, you might be surprised at these people’s stories (I know I was).
Dwayne Johnson
First up on our list is The Rock himself. Some people may think he’s uneducated because he started out as a WWF wrestler, but that’s far from the truth! He actually started out as a promising football recruit in high school and was approached by recruiters from many Division I colleges. In the end, he chose to attend the University of Miami on a full scholarship (wow!), where he played defensive tackle. He even won a national championship while playing for the University!
Johnson graduated in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in General Studies in Criminology and Physiology. He may not have become a professional law enforcement officer, but he sure has played them on-screen! After graduation, he briefly joined the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris
Did you know that Biden and Harris are the first president and vice president pair in over 36 years to not have any Ivy League credentials? Biden graduated from the University of Delaware and attended law school at Syracuse University, while Harris graduated from Howard University and continued her education at UC Hastings College of the Law.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
As with The Rock, some people may assume that AOC is also uneducated because she once worked as a bartender. However, she bears an impressive academic record, as she studied international relations and economics at Boston University, won second place in the Microbiology category at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, and even has an asteroid named after her courtesy of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory! Pretty cool, no?
Michael Jordan
Jordan is one of the greatest basketball players of all time, if not perhaps the greatest (don’t worry, we’ll touch on LeBron James later in this list). He once remarked that he never expected to be able to play basketball at a Division I college because no one from his high school ever had, despite his rank at number four on newspaper reporter Ken Mink’s Top 100 Best High School Players in the U.S. Much to his surprise, Jordan was approached by recruiters from the University of North Carolina; he accepted and majored in geography while at UNC. In the 1984 NBA draft, Jordan was the third pick and selected by the Chicago Bulls; the rest, as they say, is history.
Patrick Mahomes
Continuing our spiel on athletes is Mahomes, quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs. Before he was drafted into the NFL in 2017, he attended Texas Tech University from 2014 to 2016, where he played baseball and football. He dropped baseball in his sophomore year, though, to focus on football. Mahomes has played in the Super Bowl twice and won it once.
LeBron James
Sorry to disappoint y’all, but James never attended college and so can’t be discussed here on our list!
Prince Charles
From 1967 to 1970, Prince Charles studied anthropology and archaeology at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, though he switched to history after a couple years. Surprisingly enough, he’s the first British heir apparent to obtain a university degree! He even spent a term abroad at the University College of Wales learning Welsh in an effort to prepare for his position as Prince of Wales.
Elon Musk
Musk’s college years aren’t quite as straightforward as those of other people on our list. To understand his crazy international college-hopping, we first need to go back to his birth and childhood in South Africa. Musk wanted to enter the U.S. but found it was easier to do so if he first entered Canada, so he applied for Canadian citizenship using the fact that his mother was born in Canada. While waiting for approval, he attended the University of Pretoria for a few months so that he could avoid South Africa’s mandatory military service.
After Musk arrived in Canada, he entered Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, where he studied economics and physics. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed his degrees in economics and physics.
In 1995, he planned to attend a material sciences PhD program at Stanford University but dropped out after only two days to launch his first start-up, Zip2, which helped newspapers post maps and city guides to the Internet.
Donald Trump
I’ll bet you’ve probably heard that Trump graduated from Wharton, but did you know he transferred into Wharton from Fordham University? In an interview with the Washington Post, James Nolan, who worked in the University of Pennsylvania’s admissions office in 1966 (the year that Trump applied to transfer), said he one day got a phone call from his close friend Fred Trump Jr., asking for help to get his brother Donald into Wharton. Nolan didn’t guarantee any offer of admission, but he did promise to bring Donald in for an interview, which Donald passed (though Nolan couldn’t recall what was said or what rating Donald received). Modern audiences need to keep in mind the time period when listening to this story, Nolan notes, as the admit rate to UPenn was greater than 50%, and transfer students enjoyed an even higher admit rate.
That concludes our list of where ten famous people went to college. Hope you learned something new!
